This report identifies key challenges facing the Ethiopian civil service today and suggests avenuesfor further reforms. Ethiopia’s civil service has so far developed at a rapid pace and faces anumber of constraints, challenges, and new or expanding demands.
... Exibir mais + Continuing reform efforts and building on past achievements is critical for the successful implementation of Ethiopia’s Growth and Transformation Program (GTP II). While the past two decades have seen important achievements made, the government seeks to further strengthen its economic governance and service delivery.The analytic effort that this report reflects was triggered by a request from the Ministry ofPublic Service and Human Resource Development (MPSHRD). The Ministry sought to identify challenges and options to target and pursue further reforms and efforts to strengthen the civil service and its contributions to service delivery. The report is based on several sources: (i) the Ethiopian Civil Servants Survey (ECSS), which was undertaken in June through September 2016 and targeted professional level staff and directors or heads of federal ministries or agencies, regional bureaus, and woreda offices; (ii) a series of key informant interviews with officials and stakeholders, as well as focus group discussions with members of ‘Public Wings’; and (iii) administrative data and information, e.g. concerning the number of civil servants, as wellas salaries and benefits. The focus is on five key service delivery sectors: agriculture, education, health, revenue collection, and trade—all critical areas for state activity. The analysis encompasses an assessment of previous and ongoing reforms, and takes a look at the constraints and overall quality of current management practices. Where possible, the report also compares the civil service in Ethiopia to that of other countries, based on information gathered from similar surveys and other comparative information.
Exibir menos -

What determines the distribution of information acquired within the hierarchy of a public organization? Without market processes, the generation and absorption of information in bureaucracy relies on individual actors undertaking costly action to acquire it.
... Exibir mais + This paper reports on comparisons between individual-level claims by public officials in the Government of Ethiopia regarding the characteristics of local constituents they serve and objective benchmark data. Public officials make large errors about their constituents' characteristics. The errors of 49 percent of public officials are at least 50 percent of the underlying benchmark data. Given public officials' stated reliance on this information to make public policy decisions, such mistakes imply a substantial misallocation of public resources. The results are consistent with classic theoretical predictions related to the incentives that determine information acquisition in hierarchies, such as de facto control over decision making and an organizational culture of valuing operational information. A field experiment implies that these incentives mediate the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving the information of public-sector agents.
Exibir menos -

Sixteenth in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2019 covers 11 areas of business regulation.
... Exibir mais + Ten of these areas - starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency - are included in the ease of doing business score and ease of doing business ranking. Doing Business also measures features of labor market regulation, which is not included in these two measures. Doing Business provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 190 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level. This economy profile presents indicators for Ethiopia; for 2019 Ethiopia ranks 159.
Exibir menos -

Foreign direct investment may play an important role in transferring technologies from high-income to emerging economies, which can lead to uneven effects on the wages of skilled and unskilled workers.
... Exibir mais + This paper combines project-level data on greenfield foreign direct investment with household surveys to estimate the effects of foreign direct investment on the wage skill premium across sectors and regions in seven emerging economies (Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, and Vietnam). The results suggest that foreign direct investment is associated with a higher probability of employment and higher wages for unskilled workers, relative to skilled workers, in six of the seven countries analyzed in this paper. Moreover, the effects of foreign direct investment on wages are relatively larger for unskilled women.
Exibir menos -

In many aid projects, monitoring and evaluation is a static exercise driven by donor reporting requirements. After project closure, there are seldom sustainable benefits of the monitoring and evaluation system.
... Exibir mais + This paper examines how monitoring and evaluation can be transformed into a dynamic tool for effective project management, with benefits carrying over beyond the typical project lifecycle. The paper assesses an innovative, digital management information system developed under the Women Entrepreneurship Development Project, a Government of Ethiopia initiative financed by a World Bank International Development Association loan and grant funding from Global Affairs Canada. The paper examines the context of the development of the management information system, its effectiveness, and its potential for sustainability. Ethiopia is among the poorest countries in the world, and government administration units involved in administering projects often face funding and resource shortfalls. The paper demonstrates how effective and sustainable monitoring and evaluation systems can be developed even in challenging contexts such as these, by focusing on simple technical solutions that can be maintained and refined locally, ensuring low development and maintenance costs compatible with government monitoring and evaluation budgets, and linking project-level monitoring and evaluation to broader government operations.
Exibir menos -

This paper revisits the economic consequences of land fragmentation, taking seriously concerns regarding the exogeneity of fragmentation, its measurement and the importance of considering impacts in terms of welfare metrics.
... Exibir mais + Using data that are well-suited to addressing these issues, the analysis finds that land fragmentation reduces food insecurity. This result is robust to how fragmentation is measured and to how exogeneity concerns are addressed. Further, the paper finds that land fragmentation mitigates the adverse effects of low rainfall on food security. This is because households with diverse parcel characteristics can grow a greater variety of crop types.
Exibir menos -

Rural access is among the most important infrastructure constraints in rural Africa. Using the results from comprehensive household surveys and other data from Ethiopia, the paper recasts light on the heterogeneous impacts of road accessibility on agriculture and nonagricultural growth.
... Exibir mais + It is found that crop production is increased by major and feeder road improvements. Significant synergy is also found. When investigating further into this effect, there are two impacts: farmers' access to the input market, especially fertilizer, was improved mainly by major corridor improvement. And output market access was improved by feeder road improvement. In addition, the household's nonagricultural income is somehow increased by improved road connectivity. There must be secondary effects. The transport demand function estimated with additional data indicates that as the road network improves, people's mobility increases. Furthermore, local business employment is found to increase with road improvements. To meet the increasing demand for mobility, efficiency and frequency of transport services are important.
Exibir menos -

Although efforts at Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) are viewed as instrumental in reducing vulnerability to climate change, their impact has rarely been quantified.
... Exibir mais + Combining data on the timing and intensity of SWC interventions in select Ethiopian watersheds from 2009 to 2016 with a pixel-level panel of vegetative cover and soil moisture data derived from satellite imagery, makes it possible to assess the biophysical impacts of such measures using a difference-in-differences specification. Results point towards significant effects overall that vary by season. Tree planting and other SWC activities are more effective on degraded than on cultivated land. The results are consistent with before-after regressions for daily sediment load and stream flows in a subset of micro-watersheds. It thus appears that satellite imagery can improve the design and near-real-time monitoring of sustainable land management interventions for both watersheds and landscape.
Exibir menos -

Over the past decade, Ethiopia has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world and has registered impressive results in poverty reduction.
... Exibir mais + Ethiopia is also among the few country thatsuccessfully achieved several of the Millennium Development Goals. Over the next decade, we are committed to scaling up our efforts in all areas in order to meet the Sustainable Development Goals and achieve middle-income country status. The World Bank Group has been one of our strongest development partners since the beginning of our partnership. We are confident that this partnership will continue as we strive to reach our development objectives.
Exibir menos -

The Ethiopia case study addresses multiple dimensions of poverty of the refugee populations and the Ethiopian host community living in the vicinity.
... Exibir mais + The analysis is based on a household survey (Skills Profile Survey) conducted with the four main refugee groups in the country (Eritreans, Somalis, South Sudanese, and Sudanese) and with members of host communities. Ethiopia has been suffering from multiple refugee crises (some more protracted, some more recent) that put a strain on coping capacity of national and local authorities. In line with the overall study's objective, the goal is to inform policies on durable solutions through an evidence-based approach.
Exibir menos -

This paper explores the impact of large, individual-liability loans on the growth of women-owned microenterprises in Ethiopia. Traditionally, microfinance institutions in Ethiopia have primarily catered to female enterprises with group lending schemes that provide very small loans.
... Exibir mais + The limitations of this model are two-fold: in addition to these micro-loans being too small in size to fuel meaningful business growth, many of the female enterprises that are targeted with these loans face binding constraints, such as concentration in lower-growth sectors, lack of alternative job opportunities, limitations on time and mobility, and restrictive gender norms. The paper investigates the impact of credit to female entrepreneurs in a novel context, by examining larger loans, provided to growth-oriented women entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs fall in the "missing middle" or "meso-finance" segment of the financial market because their credit needs are too large for microfinance, but not large enough for commercial banks. The paper uses a propensity score matching methodology to examine the impact of loans offered to women as part of the Women Entrepreneurship Development Project, a program funded by the World Bank International Development Association, that targets growth-oriented women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia. The results suggest that large, individual-liability loans can make a significant difference in accelerating growth in the business incomes and employment levels of women-owned enterprises.
Exibir menos -

This paper investigates household preferences for improved cook stoves using a choice experiment administered in rural Ethiopia, and the cost-effectiveness of an improved stove for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
... Exibir mais + In Ethiopia, about 96 percent of household energy demand is fulfilled by biomass. Improved stoves use less firewood and produce less smoke, and they have been touted as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and health effects from indoor air pollution, as well as to improve forest conservation. Although there are many studies on the adoption of improved stoves, there is limited information on the willingness to pay for particular attributes of stoves, information that is vital for designing effective stoves and improving stove adoption. The paper finds that households have a positive willingness to pay for the durability, fuelwood use reduction, smoke reduction, and cooking time reduction of improved stoves. It also shows that the stove used in this experiment can be cost-effective for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which suggests that programs providing payments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions could strengthen stove adoption if they are well implemented. The main reason the stoves are not being adapted is the lack of availability, which is a key message to policy makers.
Exibir menos -

The objective of this study is to provide an updated overview on the performance of cereal markets in Ethiopia. Specifically, the study seeks to inform and guide project operations for the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) and the World Bank.
... Exibir mais + First, it aims to inform the government about incentives concerning grain storage before the GoE makes more public investments in storage facilities at the cooperative and union levels. Second, both the GoE and the World Bank need a better understanding of cereal market performance, including the constraints for private sector investment in storage facilities. Further, to respond to increasing demand from the government for more food-based (nonmarket) interventions to provide access to food to the poor instead of market-based (cash or voucher transfers), the PSNP program will need to be better informed about the level and extent of cereal market integration. The report is organized as follows: section two provides an overview of the maize and wheat subsectors. It also summarizes key observations about maize and wheat value chain performance based on a field survey. Section three details the conceptual framework and the empirical strategy to assess the maize and wheat markets performance. Section three presents the empirical model. Section four discusses data and section five presents the empirical results. Finally, the conclusions and policy implications are discussed in section six.
Exibir menos -

Ethiopia’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth is estimated to have rebounded to 10.9 percent in FY2017. According to official statistics, Ethiopia’s annual rate of economic growth, which averaged 10.3 percent over 2005/06-2015/16 (compared with the regional average of 5.4 percent), slowed to 8 percent in FY2016 due to drought-related lower agricultural production.
... Exibir mais + With agricultural recovery, gross domestic product (GDP) growth rebounded in FY2017. The pursuit of prudent fiscal policy, with a fiscal deficit at 3.4 percent of GDP, should help keep inflation under control, providing monetary conditions remain tight in the aftermath of the devaluation of the Birr in October 2017. Key challenges relate to poor export performance (Ethiopia’s growth has been driven by investment followed by private consumption) and weak trade balance, which reflect the lack of external competitiveness and the vulnerability to terms of-trade shocks. The rising risk of external debt distress may affect Ethiopia’s access to external finance. These developments require continued policy adjustment to crowd-in the private sector and strengthen Ethiopia’s competitiveness. Part one of this Economic Update, on recent economic developments and outlook, discusses Ethiopia’s growth strategy, emphasizing the sustainability of the country’s investment-focused and export-led growth model. Part two looks at the interlinkages between manufacturing and services, with a special focus on the role of distribution services in promoting Ethiopia’s export competitiveness and eventually its structural transformation.
Exibir menos -

This study sheds light on the performance of cereal markets in Ethiopia. It combines market-level temporal and spatial price analysis with a detailed analysis at the producer, wholesale and retail levels for maize and wheat value chains.
... Exibir mais + Using time series price data, the study estimates (1) price volatilities to gauge the level of risk in maize and wheat markets, (2) spatial price linkages to assess the level of spatial arbitrage opportunities and market integration, and (3) seasonal price movements to assess the level of temporal arbitrage opportunities and implications for storage decisions. The price analysis results indicate four main findings. First, maize and wheat markets are integrated in the long run. This is indicative of the improvements in road infrastructure, and the availability of trucks and mobile communications. But the long-run price transmission between the deficient and surplus markets is less than complete and the adjustments to price changes in different markets are asymmetric. This could be due to asymmetric market information, transaction costs, and government interventions. Second, there is a significant degree of unpredictability in wheat and maize prices, implying high risk for the value chain actors. There has been a slight upward movement in maize and wheat nominal and real prices in different markets and at all market levels (producer, wholesale and retail), but there is significant unpredictability in maize and wheat prices, making spot market temporal and spatial arbitrage a risky business for value chain actors. Third, spatial margins are very volatile making inter-regional grain trade risky. Fourth, although there is significant seasonality in maize and wheat prices, the returns are low with high volatility. The implied storage periods for wheat and maize required between the seasonal low and high prices appear to be very long (5 to 10 months). The empirical results indicate that holding wheat and maize stock for such a lengthy period does not provide sufficient incentives, given the very low, but highly volatile monthly price returns for maize and wheat stocks. At wholesale level, the returns for maize and wheat aggregation are better than holding grain. Overall, the results indicate that there is low commercial incentive for the private sector to invest in storage. The findings point to key areas at policy level to improve the performance of cereal markets. These include the need to reduce price unpredictability through clearer policy directions and transparent information related to grain procurement and distribution, and by improving planning and coordination among grain importing entities; establishing market intelligence and data by investing in an agricultural market information system; addressing arbitrary tax enforcement based on grain stock held by traders and wholesale distributors without considering their turnover, strengthening the capacity of cooperatives and assessing the different needs and investments options of grain storage.
Exibir menos -

Extension services have been implemented on a large scale in developing countries for decades. However, there is little evidence on their impact on the productivity and welfare of farmers.
... Exibir mais + Our study aims to begin to fill this evidence gap with the goal of identifying and encouraging the uptake of best practices for the delivery of extension services by governments.Our findings suggest that strengthening extension services to make them more responsive to the needs of farmers can induce a switch to more commercial, market-oriented agriculture.Female-headed households seem to have benefited equally from the extension services project but it did not contribute to reducing the gender gap in agricultural outcomes as their initial levels of wealth and consumption, as well as labor and capital endowments were lower.Additional research is required to identify extension services designs that contribute to closing the gender gap, by addressing more specifically the challenges faced by women in areas such as labor and capital endowment.
Exibir menos -

In the past 10 years, Ethiopia experienced high and consistent growth, invested in public goods provision to poor households, and saw impressive gains in well-being for many households.
... Exibir mais + This paper exploits variation in sectoral growth and public goods provision across zones and time, to examine whether poverty reduction was driven by growth and provision of public goods and what type of growth -- growth in agriculture, manufacturing, or services -- was more effective at reducing poverty. The paper pays particular attention to controlling for other drivers of poverty reduction and instrumenting growth in a sector of particular policy focus -- agriculture -- to identify causal effects. The analysis finds that reductions in poverty were largest in places where agricultural output growth has been higher, safety nets have been introduced, and improvements in market access have been made. Agricultural output growth caused reductions in poverty of 2.2 percent per year on average post-2005, and 0.1 percent per year prior to 2005. The government's policy focus on stimulating productivity gains in smallholder cereal farmers contributed to this growth, but only when the weather was good, and prices were high. Access to markets was essential: agricultural growth reduced poverty in places close to urban centers, but not in remote parts of the country.
Exibir menos -

In the past 10 years, Ethiopia experienced high and consistent growth, invested in public goods provision to poor households, and saw impressive gains in well-being for many households.
... Exibir mais + This paper exploits variation in sectoral growth and public goods provision across zones and time, to examine whether poverty reduction was driven by growth and provision of public goods and what type of growth, growth in agriculture, manufacturing, or services, was more effective at reducing poverty. The paper pays attention to controlling for other drivers of poverty reduction and instrumenting growth in a sector of policy focus, agriculture, to identify causal effects. The analysis finds that reductions in poverty were largest in places where agricultural output growth has been higher, safety nets have been introduced, and improvements in market access have been made. Agricultural output growth caused reductions in poverty of 2.2 percent per year on average post-2005, and 0.1 percent per year prior to 2005. The government’s policy focus on stimulating productivity gains in smallholder cereal farmers contributed to this growth, but only when the weather was good, and prices were high. Access to markets was essential: agricultural growth reduced poverty in places close to urban centers, but not in remote parts of the country.
Exibir menos -

Although efforts at soil and water conservation are routinely viewed as instrumental in reducing vulnerability to climate change, their impact has rarely been quantified.
... Exibir mais + Combining data on the timing and intensity of soil and water conservation interventions in select Ethiopian watersheds from 2009 to 2016 with a pixel-level panel of vegetative cover and soil moisture data derived from satellite imagery makes it possible to assess the biophysical impacts of such measures using a difference-in-differences specification. The results point toward significant effects overall that vary by season, and that tree planting and other soil and water conservation activities are more effective on degraded than cultivated land. The results are consistent with before-after regressions for daily sediment load and stream flows in a subset of micro-watersheds. It thus appears that satellite imagery can improve the design and near-real-time monitoring of sustainable land management interventions for watersheds and landscape.
Exibir menos -

This paper identifies and estimates the impact of firm entry and exit on plant-level productivity in Ethiopia as part of a selection mechanism that might be driving aggregate productivity growth in cities.
... Exibir mais + Specifically, the paper investigates how firms’ entry and exit contribute to the pace of factor reallocation and total factor productivity growth within industries—and whether these processes occur in higher numbers and rates in larger cities. The analysis is carried out using establishment census data from Ethiopia that cover the period from year 2000 to 2010. Importantly, these data include information on plants’ physical outputs and their prices, which allows distinguishing between revenue-based measures of total factor productivity (TFPR) and those based on physical productivity (TFPQ). The analysis reveals that these two measures generate very different results under imperfect competition, suggesting that physical productivity measures (TFPQ) are better suited to examining firm dynamics when local producers have some degree of market power. In addition, the findings show that less productive (higher cost) firms are more likely to exit than their more productive (lower cost) rivals—but the analysis controls for producers’ transport costs. This is consistent with the probability of firm exit being higher when transport costs are lower.
Exibir menos -